Stephen K. Bannon and Sam Tannenhaus talk all things climate change and the Chinese Communist Party. They talk about a new report from the Free Press on the increasing scrutiny of Chinese energy interests in the United States by the Department of Justice and state attorneys general.
00:00:29.000I wish in my soul, I wish that any of these people had a conscience.
00:00:34.000Ask yourself, what is my task and what is my purpose?
00:00:38.000If that answer is to save my country, this country will be saved.
00:00:44.000War Room. Here's your host, Stephen K. Bannon.
00:00:52.000Thursday, 18 December, Year of the Lord, 2025.
00:00:54.000You're around for the second hour of the morning edition of the War Room.
00:00:57.000Sam Tannenhaus is going to join us in a moment.
00:00:59.000Our continued discussion about Bill Buckley and his revolution.
00:01:03.000Gabe Kaminsky, George, right now from the Free Press.
00:01:06.000And just serendipously worked out it came after this print and after Dr. Peter Navarro and E.J. and Tony.
00:01:12.000So, Gabe, one of the foundational elements of President Trump's economic policy is full-spectrum energy dominance, right?
00:01:21.000You just heard Peter say right there is all kind of issues now with refineries, all this.
00:01:26.000It turns out you've got an exclusive report, if we can put it up on the Free Press, that it turns out a lot of these climate groups and do-gooder groups are in association with the Chinese Communist Party.
00:01:37.000And they are quite deep into American energy policy.
00:01:40.000And now at the state level, people are waking up to this.
00:01:43.000Can you walk us through your exclusive investigative report, sir?
00:01:48.000That's according to what you just said there.
00:01:50.000That's according to 26 Republican attorneys general.
00:01:52.000So we had reported at the Free Press that these top law enforcement officials sent a letter to the Department of Justice this week requesting that Attorney General Pam Bondi investigate whether a few different climate nonprofits in the United States focused on climate change or environmental causes may have failed to register under the Foreign Agents and Registration Act, also known as FARA, on behalf of China.
00:02:18.000And so effectively, these top law enforcement officials are accusing US nonprofits of acting as foreign agents or sort of like secret lobbyists for the Chinese Communist Party.
00:02:30.000And the basis for that, according to these officials, is that, for example, one of these nonprofits, it's called the Energy Foundation China.
00:02:38.000It's based in San Francisco, but it also has an office in Beijing where it employs a whole host of former Chinese government officials and is supervised by China's government directly because it is registered in Beijing with China's nonprofit agency.
00:02:57.000And coupled with the Energy Foundation China's advocacy in the United States related to anti-oil litigation or congressional related advocacy that is against fossil fuel and production of oil, the Attorney General think that this group and others should have to register under FARA.
00:03:19.000I mean, that's it's it's it's not just that their group and they're taking money or mayor association.
00:03:25.620When you actually go after FARA, you're saying that their their their their purpose, right, is to represent the interest of another country.
00:03:33.860In this case, the Chinese Communist Party, how did it get because these things just didn't appear yesterday.
00:03:39.640How long has this been going on and how have other DOJ officials and other state officials looked the other way on this?
00:03:46.360So the interesting thing about the Energy Foundation China is that this scrutiny is not new.
00:03:52.500This is a charity that has been registered with the IRS since 1991 and over the past five years, roughly, there has been heightened scrutiny of them, particularly among Republicans who are hawkish on China and believe that Beijing is indirectly or directly propping up groups in the United States that have this anti-oil agenda that is aiming to boost China,
00:04:15.840China, which is, I mean, China trade tensions have, you know, you just said Peter Navarro and who was talking about trade tensions, trade tensions have continued to escalate between the United States and China.
00:04:25.880Beijing has been continuing to import oil from adversary, other adversaries of the United States like Venezuela.
00:04:32.000And so coupled with that and the other sort of leg of this is that there has been heightened scrutiny in the United States of climate related organizations engaged in disruptive sort of protests in Washington, D.C., where I live.
00:04:46.820The congressional baseball game every few years now, there's climate protesters running on the field around the world.
00:04:55.060There's been reporting about climate protesters throwing paint at fine art or gluing themselves to streets or cars, which has only led American officials to believe this is a national security issue, a national security issue paying to oil and energy.
00:05:11.540And so the funding is aiming to, you know, look into that further.
00:05:16.640No, I mean, they're they're they're trying to, you know, stop refineries, make the cost of American energy because it makes us and a competitive.
00:05:23.880This is a group. The Chinese Communist Party has a one trillion dollar trade surplus this year.
00:05:28.960And, you know, folks, think about that. You talk about adversaries.
00:05:33.240Venezuela is bad enough. But I said this, you know, even if you don't want to get in the middle of the Israeli situation in the Middle East,
00:05:40.280I've been saying the Iranians, the Mullahs are in business for one reason.
00:05:44.540They basically have a long term output deals with the Chinese Communist Party.
00:05:47.780I think I think that I think Iran or the Persians provide 50 or 60 percent of the of the energy for the Chinese Communist Party.
00:05:56.480I mean, the Chinese Communist Party has a total master plan geopolitically.
00:05:59.820Part of it is to hurt the United States when it comes to Trump's full spectrum energy dominance.
00:06:06.560Gabe, do you expect action to be taken?
00:06:08.380You said this has been reviewed for a while. You get 26 AGs.
00:06:11.480Now it's a Pan Bondi. She's swamped with so much.
00:06:14.360You know, we got we were arguing that DOJ's got to get up to Brown University every day.
00:06:19.200We're banging on them. You know, we love these folks, but there's just so much to do.
00:06:22.540Are they going to have inside the group over there?
00:06:24.700Are they going to have the capacity to actually take on the CCP?
00:06:28.760I reached out to the Department of Justice.
00:06:30.560I did not hear back. If you Steve, if you hear anything from people, the DOJ, you know, let us all know.
00:06:35.860But generally, Farrah has long been a dormant office.
00:06:40.760In fact, for decades, from about 1988 to 2016, there were, I believe, under or around 10 Farrah prosecutions as a whole,
00:06:49.240which really shows how much of an obscure law it's been viewed.
00:06:55.160But right now, after Attorney General Pam Bondi issued a memo after she joined the Trump administration that signaled to law firms and lobbying firms in Washington
00:07:06.920that the DOJ was only focusing on the most serious, what they determined to be the most serious Farrah offenses,
00:07:15.280what they determined to be cases that are treason or espionage.
00:07:19.140And so on that basis, it's really not clear if the Department of Justice would be, would have, would, you know, put the resources into focusing on this.
00:07:27.460But we have not heard back from the DOJ.
00:07:29.480And my understanding from the state attorneys general is that they do, you know, it's a significant amount of states that called for this action.
00:07:36.540And they do aim to have conversations with the DOJ to force this issue.
00:08:03.780Sam Tannenhaus, Marxism, communism, Bill Buckley with Whitaker Chambers and others fully supported McCarthy because they realized after the defeat of the fascist, Imperial Japan, the Nazis, and the Italian fascists, that communism, right?
00:08:23.280And, you know, one of them was our ally, another one really wasn't, that communism was going to be a massive, massive problem and there's going to be a global conflict.
00:08:33.360So he wrote a book, Was McCarthy and His Enemies?
00:08:40.060Walk me through that because he's, you know, you see today, you know, we have Navarro up here about the trade deficit, you know, the trade surplus of a trillion dollars by the CCP.
00:08:48.300You got Kaminsky saying, hey, they got people everywhere trying to do everything to bring the United States down, including going after President Trump's energy policy.
00:08:57.180Buckley was a devout Catholic and a hardcore anti-communist.
00:09:50.780And in fact, his main mentor, a guy named Wilmore Kendall, brilliant political scientist, one of the most talented thinkers of that era, still read today, Steve, said to Buckley, watch this guy, McCarthy.
00:10:33.440And he and his brother-in-law, Brent Bozell, very important figure, in some ways, as important as Buckley as a thinker, they decide what's happening to McCarthy is that the opposition, the enemies, as they called them, is controlling the debate.
00:10:50.920They're saying, no, let's not listen to what McCarthy says.
00:11:30.760It will be the counter-argument that will be airtight, super smart, really fun to read, that's going to stand up against the liberal tide and make that case for the anti-communism.
00:11:46.980It was the greatest publication, conservative publication of its time.
00:11:50.840I'm going to get to National Review in a minute.
00:11:52.620You say something in the book that really hit me in the solar plexus, and it goes back to last night.
00:12:00.520You said they couldn't figure out because he had gone, and it was Claire Booth Luce, Luce's wife at Time magazine, that he saw speak at one of the Republican conventions.
00:12:14.960She had wit, she had class, she knew how to put the rapier in, she had everything as a speaker.
00:12:20.700And he realized that McCarthy was the exact opposite.
00:12:24.160But I think somebody told him that the power of McCarthy wasn't his rhetoric, he wasn't a great speaker, but they had a power.
00:12:31.320And his superpower was, he said things that the working class and middle class audience themselves were thinking, but wouldn't say.
00:12:40.620Very much a forerunner of Donald Trump, is he not?
00:12:44.500Yeah, I'll give you an example of that, Steve.
00:12:48.580Probably the greatest intellectual in the Buckley orbit was this philosopher and scholar James Burnham, whose book The Manager of a Revolution, I think we talked about this, inspired George Orwell.
00:13:04.400Every year, he was very much an elite guy, top of his class at Princeton, educated at Oxford after that, professor at NYU, Georgetown apartment.
00:13:16.080He would take a trip, he'd take a road trip for about six weeks, and he'd go out to the country.
00:18:48.480Trump is a much better listener than people realize.
00:18:54.000Look how much of that first campaign came out of the talk radio he was absorbing.
00:19:02.100I mean, where do you think that language comes from?
00:19:04.360You know, I wrote a piece you may remember about Josh Green's book about you.
00:19:09.000You and Donald Trump, number one bestseller.
00:19:12.540And I mentioned how some of the language that candidate Trump used about the border came out of the language of border patrol people at the time, 2015, 16, but was treated as this outrageous, you know, kind of provocation.
00:19:32.080It's the, and people heard that language who were involved in border enforcement.
00:19:37.540That was part of Buckley's thing, right?
00:19:40.880He's a great verbal guy, he's a word guy, he's a listener, he's an excellent musician, he speaks all these languages.
00:19:47.720Everything comes to him through his ears, he hears things, and then turns them around, figures out how to do his own take on them.
00:19:54.020And McCarthy was the guy who unlocked the mystery for how to get the public to understand this threat.
00:20:02.540And going forward, he realized, too, something important, and something very important for us today.
00:20:09.000Alex Jones on the show last night, in ending his analysis of the speech, said, cry havoc and unleash the dogs of information warfare.
00:20:17.520Buckley and Bozell and the rest realized in McCarthy getting banged up that it wasn't that he didn't have the facts.
00:20:26.260It wasn't that he didn't have a thing that people would rally around, but he had let other people craft the narrative or put the architecture around the narrative.
00:20:34.660And that's eventually what destroyed him.
00:20:36.280And they were determined not to allow that to happen to the conservative movement.
00:20:41.600Yeah, I'll tell you how Buckley knew this, too, Steve.
00:20:45.200It's an episode in the book, really important.
00:20:48.340After Edward R. Murrow, you know, the great CBS broadcaster, went after McCarthy, which he began to do, by the way, after McCarthy had begun to slide, right?
00:21:09.600If you look at this book, it was a bestseller.
00:21:12.400But one reason people were surprised by it, and McCarthy himself had trouble reading it, was it was so densely footnoted.
00:21:18.800You know, it's constructed out of all these particular investigations of people's ideological histories, of their possible compromises when they're working in government and all the rest.
00:21:33.500He's a great debater, probably the greatest debater of his time.
00:21:36.700So Edward R. Murrow says to McCarthy, well, if you don't like, he said this on the air, how I've been treated, you can come on and rebut me.
00:21:47.700Well, McCarthy is now barnstorming through Wisconsin elections coming up, 1954.
00:21:53.700But McCarthy is the number one draw, by the way, for the Republicans in the midterms.
00:21:58.680So McCarthy says, well, I don't have time to talk to you, but I know a young guy who does.
00:22:06.240Bill Buckley will go on the air and refute you for 30 minutes.
00:22:11.180Buckley told me he's sitting at home watching on TV, the TV news, and McCarthy says this.
00:33:54.860But that's enough if they're organized to make a difference in politics and in communities, which is what they're all about.
00:34:01.240So Robert Welch announces they're going to have a college competition to see who can write the best essay saying the chief justice of the Supreme Court, Earl Warren, should be impeached.
00:34:15.140And it's going to be an essay that makes the constitutional case for removing him.
00:34:21.180The New York Times reported that on page one as if it's an invasion coming from Mars.
00:35:00.200Eisenhower was a Republican president.
00:35:02.980Earl Warren was a Republican chief justice of the Supreme Court.
00:35:06.900It's not like he's going after, he's going after people that they considered the established order of the Republican and Conservative Party, correct?
00:35:42.780The National Review and Buckley had their own term for it.
00:35:45.700They called it the liberal establishment, capital L, capital E.
00:35:49.400You had to keep telling the editors at Random House, no, you can't lowercase it.
00:35:53.140It's the liberal establishment because they saw it as going across both parties.
00:35:56.680You know, kind of what we would call a blob or something or deep state today, that if you go in the big kind of muddle middle, the two parties kind of sound like each other.
00:36:06.580This is what Buckley's genius was, to lead an insurgency against it.
00:36:10.500You wouldn't know anything about that, Steve.
00:36:12.420They didn't have a conservative, they didn't have conservatism ink back then.
00:36:17.840You know, you and some other people came up with that term.
00:37:06.520But once Welch himself became super vulnerable, because he can't stop himself, he goes on television and he starts repeating this stuff about Eisenhower.
00:37:16.920And Buckley and others are saying, this is not going to work.
00:37:20.300So, Steve, here's who got together in a private hotel room in, interesting, wait for it, Palm Beach, to figure out what to do about it.
00:37:31.000Bill Buckley was one, the great conservative writer and thinker Russell Kirk was another, and a senator who is kind of making waves from Arizona, who comes in dressed like a cowboy named Barry Goldwater.
00:37:45.500Buckley wrote a great account of it, a reminiscence through the end of his life.
00:37:48.700And he said, Barry Goldwater had a briefcase, but if he ever opened it that entire meeting at the Breakers, I never saw him do it.
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00:46:00.300Cameron Kinsey, former White House official, staffer over there.
00:46:06.060You know, Scott Besson is now in charge of the IRS.
00:46:08.560The great Citizen Kane, who, by the way, mediates it as the 15th most powerful site out there, put up this analysis that showed in a couple of years, we're going to be spending $2 trillion a year in interest payments on the debt.
00:46:20.680Right. And the debt's going to be out of control by then.
00:46:24.320So the IRS and Scott Besson has told the president, hey, everything that we're rightfully owed, we're going to get.
00:46:30.020Now, the gap is between what they feel they're owed and what you, you know, what the citizen feels they're owed.
00:46:35.540And that is where in the middle of that is where Tax Network USA come in.
00:46:46.040And no matter who is in office, we are going to continue to fight for hardworking Americans.
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00:47:14.520They know how the IRS operates and they know how to push back effectively, Steve.
00:47:18.960And, you know, the truth is the IRS sometimes doesn't care who's in charge politically.